The Selected Undergraduate Works collection began in May 2020 as a way of sharing the valuable work of Sarah Lawrence College undergraduate students. The works included here have all been submitted by the faculty member for whom the work was created. All submissions met the following criteria:
- selected and submitted by a faculty member
- student scholarly or creative work from the current academic year
- the work does not infringe on existing copyright
- the work is of the quality appropriate for online distribution and access
Types of Access:
The work is either open access (freely available online to anyone) OR available to the Sarah Lawrence College community only.
Copyright for all works is held by the author(s).
Please contact digitalcommons@sarahlawrence.edu for additional information or questions.
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PHAROAHS AND EMBARGOS: EGYPTOMANIA SONGS AS RE-INTERPRETATIONS OF THE NEW KINGDOM IN ANGLOPHONE CULTURAL MEMORY.
Sophia Baldassari
Africana Studies | African History | Classical Archaeology and Art History | Cultural History | Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Other Music | Social History | United States History
Twentieth-century Anglophone waves of "Egyptomania" - in the second and seventh decades forms the basis for much of our cultural understanding of the New Kingdom. The songs "Old King Tut" and "King Tut" provide an examples of this aforementioned narrative surrounding the life of Tutankhamen, an eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh.Their extremely inaccurate lyrics do more than induce eye-rolling from scholars of Ancient Egyptian history, these subversions of the truth reveal the politics behind both twentieth-century waves of Egyptomania.This essay, written for the Sarah Lawrence Programme at Wadham College, University of Oxford, examines these songs as examples of cultural attitudes towards the New Kingdom with the relevant social context.
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Our Accumulation Addiction: The Harm of Overconsumption and Rehabilitation Treatments for our Minds and the Environment
Holly Gregory
Agricultural and Resource Economics | Psychology | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology
In the same way an addict rationalizes using their substance, environmental degradation has been framed as an unfortunate side effect of our inevitable progress towards a predetermined future. These tendencies are justified using a constructed narrative built on cultural techniques and global systems of oppression, conditioning our minds to be in a constant state of desire. By framing consumerism as an addiction, this analysis questions the source of our unbridled dysregulated desire, investigates potential harm reduction addiction interventions and applies them on a global scale as a treatment for our consumption craving. This path away from consumption dependency engages the difficulties of living simply, our fear of scarcity, and a critical long-term approach to pleasure in an attempt to imagine a future in which we consciously rehabilitate our relationship with the environment by healing our bodies and minds.
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DEFINING ON-CAMPUS SUSTAINABILITY AT SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
Sustainability Workshop 2022/2023 Members
Community College Leadership | Curriculum and Social Inquiry | Environmental Studies | Higher Education | Organizational Communication | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Social Justice
Throughout the course of the 2022/2023 academic year, students of the Sustainability Workshop have struggled to understand what “sustainability” means to Sarah Lawrence College. While “sustainability” can refer to a broad range of climate and eco-conscious related activity, without a common working definition of what on-campus sustainability is to Sarah Lawrence College, implementation of environmentally-focused policies have become ad hoc initiatives that have lived and died with incoming and departing student bodies, rather than lasting programs that would foster and develop an environmentally responsible campus.
Given these challenges, students have worked together to compile this report to define what sustainability needs to be at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Wanderscaping: Stirring Agitated Reflections into Our Home The Campus
K. Annie Bingham
Community-Based Research | Critical and Cultural Studies | Defense and Security Studies | Educational Sociology | Environmental Health | Human Ecology | Infrastructure | Leadership Studies | Organizational Communication | Other Plant Sciences | Place and Environment | Politics and Social Change | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance | Social Justice
Wanderscaping is a two part project completed over the 2021-2022 school year. The first portion, "Wanderscaping Our Home The Campus" meanders through the physical space of Sarah Lawrence College, as a landscape and an institution, while the second, "Stirring An Agitated Reflection" floats that knowledge in the psychic space of an interconnected host of guides, through books, conversations, and other media. As a whole this project is a process-oriented wrangling of freedom, connection, and their borders. It has culminated in practices of public participatory performance, photography, mapping, iconography, audio recording, and writing. Wanderscaping aims to share a space to dream in, so that we might wake up in our power.
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Somewhere Warm: A Collection of Short Stories
Christy Ammons
Fiction
“Somewhere Warm” is a collection of short stories about the journey of a middle-aged woman whose house is foreclosed. The collection focuses on the relationships between the woman and the people in her life and how losing her house affected not just her, but also her family, particularly her daughter.
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Illustrated Choreography of Spirals
Kasey Britt
Anatomy | Dance | Illustration | Performance Studies
This independent project was created for the yearlong Anatomy component class in Dance. The author utilized movement practice, viewing video recordings, anatomical study and analysis, sketching and drawing, to develop and produce a detailed visual representation of Spirals, choreographed by Irene Dowd © 1991.
Spirals is a complex and comprehensive warm up and cool down choreographic sequence for dancers, built upon functional anatomy and neuromuscular training principles. During the fall semester and for the first eight weeks of the spring semester, the author learned and refined their performance of this material, as well as making anatomical drawings and engaging in movement analysis. Following the shift to off-campus instruction, the author chose to pursue in-depth study of Spirals through the creation of a visually rendered version. There are 92 individual images in pencil, which serve as specific directions for performance of the choreography.
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Postnatal Bonding and Barriers: a Literature Review on Helping Secure Mother-Infant Attachment
Ivory C. Butler
Psychology | Social and Behavioral Sciences
The purpose of this literature review is to explore obstacles that interfere with mother-infant attachment, and what can be done to overcome these barriers. Poor mother-infant attachment can lead to strained relationships in adulthood, the worsening of pre-existing mental health issues in mothers, and a myriad of negative side effects in children, impaired social and emotional health among them. This paper examines peer-reviewed articles on obstacles to mother-infant bonding and proposes potential solutions. Methods that were found to enhance attachment include maximizing skin to skin contact, treating postpartum pathology, and reducing emotional distress in pregnancy and labor.
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A Partial and Official Library Catalog of Potential COVID-19 Literature
Ned Checketts, Nicole Dähler, Hazelle Gem Lacap Ferrer, Sara Flaherty, Harper Goldman, Michael McCabe, Niko Newbould, Bridget O'Keefe, Magnolia Robinson, Liza Rosen, Rachel St. Ours, Rafaella Sverner Dhelomme, Sam Taub, Emma Tynan, and Myles Austin Zavelo
Fiction
While writers and editors and publishers all across our great novel-reading republic have sought to dissuade any and all literary efforts to commune with the COVID-19 outbreak (suggesting that it would be simultaneously gauche and tedious to chronicle this Moment via the edifice of books), it turns out that an entire catalog of COVID-19 novels already exists and has always existed, awaiting this juncture in space-time to reveal itself to a hungry (and restless) reading public. Herewith, then, we present a cross-section of that very catalog, a small sampling of those books that we presume (as we must) exist within humanity’s ever-expanding library, replete with hope and despair, tragedy and comedy, loss and redemption… the full palette of human feeling and experience. While we continue our efforts to cross-reference these offerings with more widely available library databases, we delay no further in presenting our findings to posterity, to a future which we hope will judge us kindly.
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How to Support Trauma in Schools
Sam Katel
Child Psychology | Early Childhood Education | Educational Psychology | School Psychology
This paper is an analysis of three different programs serving children who have gone through trauma in early childhood. A typical Westchester public school special education program, Ramapo for Children located in Rhinebeck, NY, and Mulberry Bush School in Oxford, England provide a closer look into the options and treatment these students receive. Most of the methods are grounded in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), trauma-informed education, and social-emotional learning curriculums. Through examining the structures and approaches of these schools and camps, most effective and ineffective evidence-based practices are distilled.
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Confessional Melancholy: W.G. Sebald’s Aesthetic Solution to the Inadequacy of Representation
Theo Koskoff
German Language and Literature | Modern Literature | Other Philosophy | Theory and Criticism
In the wake of W.G. Sebald’s death in 2001, scholarship on his unique, genre-bending literary texts has flourished. Though much of this scholarship has paid due attention to the theme of the inadequacy of representation, little has been written that focuses on Sebald’s persistent expressions of melancholy in relation to this theme. In this paper, I argue that Sebald’s response to the inadequacy of representation is “confessional melancholy”: he expresses anguish at that which has been lost by admitting that his own literary representation is inadequate in portraying its subjects. Using a theoretical framework borrowed from Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School philosophers, I show that Sebald ties the inevitable inadequacy of representation to the history of material destruction; in this sense, his expressions of confessional melancholy are ethically motivated. I then explore the effect of this theme on the nature of identity in Sebald’s texts. Finally, I analyze the incorporation of photography in Sebald’s texts and the author’s use of narrative collages to argue that Sebald primarily expresses confessional melancholy through his aesthetic form, as opposed to the content of his literature.
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Cultural Memory through Spaces: An Analysis of A. Mitgutsch’s House of Childhood and J. Erpenbeck’s Visitation
Rachel Lynch
Comparative Literature | German Language and Literature | Modern Literature | Theory and Criticism
Anna Mitgutsch’s House of Childhood (2000) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (2008) use places as holders of cultural memory and historical witnesses. House of Childhood follows Max Berman as he returns to his childhood village to reclaim his Jewish family’s house. Visitation offers snapshots of German life in the same house in different time periods. Cultural memory, in Jan Assmann’s theory, is memory rooted in objectivized culture. When culture is crystallized into texts, images, buildings, landscapes, etc., these objects hold the history of a group and inform the group’s unity and self-image. Assmann outlines six characteristics of cultural memory: concretion of identity, capacity to reconstruct, formation, organization, obligation, and reflexivity. The town of H. in House of Childhood and the central house in Visitation meet each of these characteristics. The novels explore the importance of cultural memory in situations where memory is not passed on by people.
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Independent Creative Component in Dance
Emily McMullen
Anatomy | Dance | Other Theatre and Performance Studies | Performance Studies
This semester-long project in dance utilized improvisation, anatomical study and analysis, reading, writing, and consistent movement practice, to develop a warm up focusing on areas of specific technical and creative interest to the author and initially, a research partner. The weekly research sessions were conducted in a dance studio for the first eight weeks of the semester. Following the shift to off-campus instruction, the work was adjusted to residential and outdoor spaces for the remaining seven weeks, and was conducted independently by the author. The report includes photographic records as well as detailed notes on the research and development process.
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Puppets in The Garden: Artifice and Nature in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop
Hazel Pritchard
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Fiction | Modern Literature | Other Theatre and Performance Studies
Puppets are uncanny figures, both in and beyond literature. They embody a ‘thing life’, according to author and academic Kenneth Gross, combining object materialism with imitations of human thought, emotion, and action. The combination of unrelatable object life and relatable human narrative combines to create the emotion Sigmund Freud terms the uncanny, in which something strange and unknown invokes a sense of the familiar. British feminist author Angela Carter uses puppets, and their uncanniness, in her novel The Magic Toyshop. Her characters remind us of puppets, treading a line between familiar and unrecognizable.
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Mobile Homes and a Peripheral Solidarity
Tansy Gibler
Inequality and Stratification | Place and Environment | Politics and Social Change | Regional Sociology | Social Psychology and Interaction
The misrepresentation of mobile home communities within media and popular culture has created an image of vagrants and criminals from a population in the pursuit of an affordable independence. Mixed with the effort to hide these communities from suburban and city life, as well as portraying them as a “dying out” trend of the late 20th century, these stereotypes increase the political vulnerability of those living in mobile homes. In reflection of the problem over the course of this study, the original analysis and criticism of representation grows into a deeper study of solidarity. The ostracization felt by rural and low-income communities due to the being mocked and belittled for living outside of the “picture-perfect” suburban utopia of the 1950s image of the American Dream creates a widespread camaraderie in which traits seen as negatively low-class or “trashy” are reclaimed as desirable and worthy of pride. In further exploring the self-created identity of this community on the periphery, examples will be taken from documentaries, personal narratives, and country music.
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A Nineteenth-Century Modernist: Walt Whitman’s Influence on American Modernist Poetry
Zoe Patterson
Poetry
In “Democratic Vistas”, Walt Whitman calls for an American literary revolution. He asserts that American poetry should reach towards the future; that American poetry should strive to create a society of strong, active readers through intellectual complexity; and that American poetry should break from European literary traditions. Whitman’s poetry carries out this revolution only partially; his poetry extends towards the modern, yet still somewhat clings to European traditions. This paper posits Whitman as a precursor of literary modernism, examines his influence on American modernist poetry, and explores the ways in which four American modernist poets fulfil his call for revolution.